![]() ![]() 1 Because white audiences (apart from select abolitionists) were hesitant to accept Black testimony about slavery, writers like Douglass had to consider how their readership received their stories, which is to say that endemic racial ideologies influenced authors' rhetorical strategies. The political environment in which Frederick Douglass wrote his first two autobiographies- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)-determined more than just the contents of those texts. By showing how the narratives' treatment of African cosmologies can implant uncertainty that raises questions about the logic that legitimated chattel slavery, this essay establishes Douglass's autobiographies as early experiments with radical black aesthetics. In his cryptic representations, I explain, Douglass enlivens mêtis-a technique in which speakers feign one purpose to cleverly achieve their opposite-as a radical rhetorical appeal. I argue that Douglass evokes Yorùbá folk knowledge in his characterizations of Sandy Jenkins and his supernatural root, and that the narratives' performance of objectivity and neutrality when representing them creates a sensibility of conceptual instability in the narratives. PS A postscript is something ‘written after’.This essay shows how Frederick Douglass's first two autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), ambiguously represent the power of African cosmologies in ways that might disorient the nineteenth-century white readership into rethinking the illogic of slavery. Similarly, describe was borrowed from Old French as descrive, and b was later substituted for v in order to give the word a Latin pedigree. Script was borrowed in the form scrite from Old French escrit, which had lost the Latin p, but p was later inserted in order to make the original Latin etymology clear. The modern spellings and pronunciations of some of these words result from the practice of remodelling English in order to make it comply with Latin. The verb con’script (a back formation from con’scription) is an exception, and script itself is both a noun and a verb, as is scribble. Notice that the verbs in this set of words are generally formed with – scribe and the nouns and adjectives with – script-: verbsĭe’scriptive, scripted, unscripted, ‘ nondescript Conscription is the process of making people join the armed forces, and someone who has been con ‘scripted is a ‘ conscript. The scriptures of a religion are its sacred writings. Doctors’ prescriptions are now printed by computer, but in the old days doctors were notorious for writing them in an indecipherable scribble.Ī manuscript was originally, unlike a typescript, a handwritten text (just as something manufactured was made by hand, or manually). In Britain, at least, unclear handwriting is a characteristic traditionally ascribed to doctors. Prescribe and proscribe can easily be confused with each other, but they have almost opposite meanings: to prescribe something is to say that it should happen, whereas to proscribe something is to denounce or prohibit it. If you want to be taken off an internet mailing list you can often unsubscribe with a click of your mouse, but you might find it more difficult to unsubscribe from an opinion you have expressed! ![]() when you take out a subscription to it – your name is added to the existing list of subscribers (although probably not at the bottom of the list!), and if you subscribe to an idea or opinion, it is as if you add your name to the list of people who already support the idea. To subscribe is literally to ‘write below’. ![]() To transcribe is literally to ‘write across’, and inscribe to ‘write in’, while to describe was originally to ‘write down’. So, for example, to circumscribe ( circum = around) something is literally to draw a line around it, and thus to limit or restrict it. ![]()
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